This disclosure relates generally to online systems, and more specifically to providing notifications about actions on the online system to an online system user at a time when the user is predicted to be active.
Online systems, such as social networking systems, allow users to connect and communicate with other users of the online system. Many online systems allow users to perform various actions, for example, uploading and sharing content items with other users of the online system. The online system sends notifications describing these actions to various users. For example, to increase the likelihood that other users will see and interact with content items uploaded by users, the online system sends notifications to inform other users about each new content item that has been posted. As an online system gains popularity, the number of actions performed by users via the online system increases, and the number of content items posted to the online system increases. After a certain point, providing a notification for each new action has the effect of flooding users with a large number of notifications, and this causes users to ignore the notifications altogether.